She stared at him.
“This is not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” he asked.
“A small house,” she admitted. “Near the market.”
He handed her a glass of water.
“People say many things.”
As she looked around the lavish room, a new confusion took hold.
If this was his life, then who exactly had she married?
Dinner was quiet but gentle. The food was better than anything she had eaten in months. And after the meal, when Moses led her upstairs, she braced herself for another humiliation.
Instead, he stopped at a bedroom door.
“This is your room.”
“My room?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him. “You mean our room.”
“No,” he said calmly. “You deserve time.”
She could not answer.
That night, sitting on the edge of a soft bed in a room larger than the house she had grown up in, Catherine realized something strange.
The future she had feared might not be the one waiting for her after all.
The next morning, sunlight woke her. For years she had risen before dawn to fetch water and serve others. Now breakfast was already waiting downstairs.
At the table, Moses sat reading from a tablet. The spread before them looked like something from a hotel—eggs, fruit, bread, tea, coffee.
“This is too much,” Catherine said quietly.
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